Second World War

According to western stereotype, the Japanese at the time of the Second World War were passive and obedient automatons. Yet the realities of daily life in imperial Japan were complex and politically charged.

Roger Moorhouse tells the story of the Lützow, a partly built German cruiser delivered to the Soviet Union in 1940 and renamed the Petropavlovsk, following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.

William Brooke Joyce took to the airwaves on 14 September 1939.

Geoffrey Evans describes how British and Indian forces recovered Burma from the Japanese during the Second World War.

Prospects seemed encouraging for the Italian Empire in 1940, writes Patricia Wright, but an arduous defeat ensued.

On March 19th, 1942, a British officer, riding the “best polo pony in Burma,” launched a headlong charge against a Japanese machine-gun emplacement. He died as he would probably have chosen to die; and with his death, writes James Lunt, concluded a long and distinguished chapter in the history of the British Army.

In deciding on the Reoccupation of the Rhineland, writes D.C. Watt, Hitler said that he went forward “with the assurance of a sleepwalker...” His practical calculations proved to be “entirely justified.”

The Field Marshal who had led his country to independence in 1918, writes Oliver Warner, was called upon twice to defend his own creation during the Second World War.

A man of obsessions, a passionate racialist with a romantic belief in the virtues of the ‘sturdy peasant farmer’, Quisling ruled war-time Norway as a devoted pupil of the Nazi government.

The suffering of prisoners of war at the hands of the Japanese during the Second World War has coloured the British view of the conflict in the Far East. Clare Makepeace highlights a little known aspect of the captives’ story: their quest for compensation.